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Annual Report 2021: LibreOffice releases and updates

In 2021, LibreOffice celebrated its eleventh birthday. Two new major versions of the suite introduced a variety of new features, while minor releases helped to improve stability as well

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2021 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

The Document Foundation announced two major releases of LibreOffice in 2021: version 7.1 on February 3, and version 7.2 on August 19. In addition 13 minor releases were also made available:

  • LibreOffice 7.1.1 – March 4
  • LibreOffice 7.0.5 – March 12
  • LibreOffice 7.1.2 – April 1
  • LibreOffice 7.1.3 – May 6
  • LibreOffice 7.0.6 – May 13
  • LibreOffice 7.1.4 – June 10
  • LibreOffice 7.1.5 – July 22
  • LibreOffice 7.1.6 – September 9
  • LibreOffice 7.2.1 – September 16
  • LibreOffice 7.1.7 – November 4
  • LibreOffice 7.2.3 – November 25
  • LibreOffice 7.2.4 and 7.1.8 – December 6

In July, our Quality Assurance community organised a Bug Hunting Session in preparation for the release of LibreOffice 7.2. This was based on the first Release Candidate (RC), and we encouraged technically-minded users to try out the RC and help to identify and fix bugs before the final release. Communication took part on our QA IRC channel, which is also bridged to a Telegram group. The session ran from 07:00 UTC to 19:00 UTC.

LibreOffice 7.1

On February 3, LibreOffice 7.1 was officially released after six months of work. Developers at Collabora, allotropia, CIB, Red Hat, NISZ, The Document Foundation and other companies and organisations – along with volunteers – worked on many new features. For instance, a new dialog was added which lets users select their desired user interface design on first startup (including the regular menu+toolbar setup, and NotebookBar alternative).

In Writer, a new Style Inspector was created to display the attributes of Paragraph and Character Styles, and manually formatted (Direct Formatting) properties. In Calc, significant speed improvements for Autofilter and find/replace operations were implemented, while the possibility to add visible signatures to existing PDF files in Draw was included too. On top of the new features, there were many other general improvements to performance, compatibility and stability.

With the help of the Indonesian community, TDF produced a video to explain and demonstrate many of the new features in LibreOffice 7.1. This was linked to in the announcement, and embedded into various web news websites that covered the release. The video is also available on PeerTube.

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LibreOffice 7.2

Later in the year, on August 19, TDF released LibreOffice 7.2. Based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, it provided a large number of interoperability improvements with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats. In addition, LibreOffice 7.2 Community offered numerous performance improvements in handling large files, opening certain DOCX and XLSX files, managing font caching, and opening presentations and drawings that contain large images. There were also drawing speed improvements when using the Skia back-end that was introduced with LibreOffice 7.1.

A popup list to search for menu commands was added to the user interface, helping new users to find features that may otherwise be tucked away inside the menu. In addition, a built-in “Xray”-like UNO object inspector was implemented, along with a new list view for the Templates dialog. In Writer, background fills were updated to cover whole pages, beyond margins, while in Calc, HTML tables listed in the External Data dialogue now show captions. Impress was boosted with a set of new templates, to make presentations more attractive and appealing: Candy, Freshes, Grey Elegant, Growing Liberty, Yellow Idea and more.

Many other features were added as well, and there were a large number of compatibility improvements. As with the previous release, the TDF team worked with the Indonesian LibreOffice community to make a video to demonstrate the new features:

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LibreOffice project and community recap: March 2022

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…

  • We started off March with a custom shape tutorial from Regina Henschel. If you’ve ever tried to draw special and complex shapes beyond the basic offerings of LibreOffice, check it out!

  • During March, TDF released two new updates for LibreOffice: 7.3.1 and 7.3.2. These fix bugs and improve compatibility – so all users of the 7.3 branch are recommended to update. (We also released LibreOffice 7.2.6 on March 10.)

  • Meanwhile, the Czech community worked on a translation of the LibreOffice Base Guide 6.4. Thanks to Marcela Tomešová, Martin Kasper, Zdeněk Crhonek, Jan Martinovský, Roman Toman and Miloš Šrámek for their great work! 👍

  • How can we make free and open source software development sustainable in the long term? Mike Saunders from The Document Foundation appeared on the Sustain OSS podcast to talk about this issue, along with the challenges and opportunities in building communities.

  • In the middle of the month, the Board of Directors at The Document Foundation started its new term. Welcome to new new members, and thank you to those who are moving on, for all their work and support.

  • Companies in the LibreOffice ecosystem contribute many features and fixes to the software, and provide long-term support (LTS) versions and other benefits. We caught up with Michael Meeks of Collabora Productivity to find out what his team has been working on in recent versions of the suite.

  • And finally, our documentation team announced the Writer Guide 7.3. This covers all aspects of the word processing component in LibreOffice, and is well worth keeping on your (digital) bookshelf…

Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Mastodon. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and help to make LibreOffice even better!

LibreOffice 7.3.2 Community available for download

Berlin, March 31, 2022 – LibreOffice 7.3.2 Community, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 7.3 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

The LibreOffice 7.3 family offers the highest level of compatibility in the office suite market segment, starting with native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) – beating proprietary formats in the areas of security and robustness – to superior support for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files.

Microsoft files are still based on the proprietary format deprecated by ISO in 2008, which is artificially complex, and not on the ISO approved standard. This lack of respect for the ISO standard format may create issues to LibreOffice, and is a huge obstacle for transparent interoperability.

LibreOffice for enterprise deployments

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and Service Level Agreements: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

LibreOffice Community and the LibreOffice Enterprise family of products are based on the LibreOffice Technology platform, the result of years of development efforts with the objective of providing a state of the art office suite not only for the desktop but also for mobile and the cloud.

Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud. They may have a different name, according to each company brand strategy, but they share the same LibreOffice unique advantages, robustness and flexibility.

Availability of LibreOffice 7.3.2 Community

LibreOffice 7.3.2 Community represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites. For users whose main objective is personal productivity and therefore prefer a release that has undergone more testing and bug fixing over the new features, The Document Foundation provides LibreOffice 7.2.6.

LibreOffice 7.3.2 change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.3.2/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.3.2/RC2 (changed in RC2). Over 80 bugs and regressions have been solved.

LibreOffice Technology based products for Android and iOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/, while for App Stores and ChromeOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-from-microsoft-and-mac-app-stores/

LibreOffice individual users are assisted by a global community of volunteers: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help the project to make all of these resources available.

LibreOffice users are invited to join the community at https://ask.libreoffice.org, where they can get and provide user-to-user support. People willing to contribute their time and professional skills to the project can visit the dedicated website at https://whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can provide financial support to The Document Foundation with a donation via PayPal, credit card or other tools at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

LibreOffice 7.3.2 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

Writer Guide 7.3

Writer Guide 7.3 comes with the latest updates for LibreOffice Community 7.3

The Documentation team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the Writer Guide 7.3.

This user guide has been updated from Writer Guide 7.2. It covers changes that are visible in the LibreOffice Writer user interface and additional information from earlier releases, including:

  • Enhancements to Track Changes (Chapter 3). More details are in the Release Notes.
  • Added details about the Print dialog in macOS (Chapter 7).
  • Updated details about Templates dialog (Chapter 10).
  • Updated list terminology in Chapter 11 and anywhere else lists are mentioned.
  • Minor rewording and replacement figures in several chapters.

LibreOffice 7.3 Community includes many changes not visible in the user interface. These changes include further improvements in interoperability with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats, including new features targeted at users migrating from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, or exchanging documents between the two office suites. These improvements include:

  • New handling of change tracking in tables and when text is moved.
  • Performance improvements when opening large DOCX and XLSX/XLSM files, improved rendering speed of some complex documents, and new rendering speed improvements when using the Skia back-end introduced with LibreOffice 7.1.
  • Improvements to import/export filters.
  • ScriptForge libraries, which make it easier to develop macros, have been extended with various features.

LibreOffice Community 7.3 release notes are here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.3.

This update was possible with the volunteer work of Jean H. Weber and Kees Kriek from the LibreOffice Documentation Team.  A big thank you to Jean and Kees for their wonderful work.

Jean Weber
Kees Kriek

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Donwload the LibreOffice Writer Guide 7.3 from the Documentation website and the LibreOffice Bookshelf.

The LibreOffice Documentation Team is devoted to produce the best documentation for LibreOffice and is open to everyone interested in contributing to our collective effort.

The Document Foundation supports the “Deutschlandstipendium”

In 2019, the German LibreOffice community sadly lost one of its most active members, Klaus-Jürgen Weghorn. In his memory, The Document Foundation (the non-profit foundation behind LibreOffice) has decided to support a student through the Deutschlandstipendium initiative:

With the Deutschlandstipendium, the German government is expanding student funding through a program that is also kick-starting a new scholarship culture in Germany. The federal government and private sponsors – companies, associations, foundations and individuals – work together to support high-achieving students. In this way, civil society is taking responsibility for talented young people and making a contribution to Germany’s future.

We are in contact with the student and will report more here on the blog.

LibreOffice ecosystem interview: Michael Meeks at Collabora Productivity

Following our interviews with Caolán McNamara at Red Hat and Thorsten Behrens at allotropia, today we’re talking to Michael Meeks from Collabora Productivity:

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m Michael Meeks, a Christian, husband and enthusiastic open source developer. I run Collabora’s Office division with the assistance of an amazing team – leading our Collabora Online and Office products, and supporting customers and partners. I’ve served as a Director of the The Document Foundation from its founding until recently, and have contributed to both the OpenDocument Format and OOXML standardization.

I’d started some decades ago working on the Linux desktop in the GNOME project around the Gnumeric spreadsheet, first as a volunteer, then for Ximian – which was involved in the open-sourcing of OpenOffice.org. Since then, I’ve been involved with improving the codebase, although the name of my employer has changed from Ximian, Novell, Attachmate, Micro Focus, SUSE – and finally being spun out alongside a brave and talented subset of the SUSE LibreOffice team to Collabora Productivity some nine years ago.

What does Collabora Productivity provide in the LibreOffice ecosystem?

One big piece we do is improving the awesome LibreOffice Technology core engine / APIs, and performance for Collabora Online – which provides a real alternative to Microsoft Office 365 – with collaborative editing in the browser. We spend time working hard on integrations with popular open source products like Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, EGroupware, and proprietary ones such as HiDrive, Filr – as well as helping hosting providers like Strato provide LibreOffice Technology to their users en-masse.

Around Collabora Online, we have a mission to allow you to control your documents. That means full control from open source software, open standard file formats, through to on-premise hosting, and full network control. It is encouraging to see the growing consensus these days between e.g. The European Pirate Party (enthusiastic Collabora Online users) talking positively about the importance of Digital Sovereignty, and at another pole – for instance, the head of the UK’s MI6 warning on the BBC:

“The data-trap is this: that if you allow another country to gain access to really critical data about your society, over time that will erode your sovereignty.”

For Collabora’s customers, we also take a new LibreOffice version each year and freeze this as our Long-Term Support (LTS) base; we create many hundreds of fixes and feature patches which we contribute up-stream, as well as back-porting the latest fixes to our enterprise branch: much as is done for an enterprise Linux distribution. We sell that toegher with services and support as Collabora Office. We also maintain a tool (Collabora OLE Automation Tool) to ease migration of vertical applications that use Visual Basic / OLE2 integration that makes LibreOffice behave like Microsoft Office via COM. In addition, we maintain Collabora Office and LibreOffice Windows Group Policy Templates – these make it easy to manage lots of LibreOffice machines via Group Policy.

Another strand of work is re-packaging Collabora Online / LibreOffice Technology as responsive mobile apps for Android and iOS, as well as Chrome OS. By delivering LibreOffice-based document editing to everyone’s browsers, PCs and mobile devices, we give people a real alternative that lets them choose their own document formats, security profile and threat model – real digital sovereignty.

What has Collabora been working on in LibreOffice 7.3?

We’ve been working on lots of things: some of the team have done a lot for interoperability, e.g. Miklos improving writer’s paragraph styling, or Dennis making charts more compatible, or Sarper re-working our PowerPoint header/footer interoperability. There is a constant stream of improvements based on customer feedback here.

Another big set of improvements in LibreOffice 7.3 are from Lubos and Noel around the performance of file opening, rendering, editing of documents as well as improving calculation threading. One particularly important piece here was the work done to very significantly improve performance of lots of editors in a single file – which has been back-ported to make Collabora Online very much faster in our latest releases.

We are looking forward to upgrading to LibreOffice 7.3 in the next months, and not having to carry these back-ports forward.

What new features are you particularly happy with?

I’ve been really pleased with the work we’ve done alongside AMD around Skia rendering – in LibreOffice 7.3 we make that the default for macOS (users, please report any problems), which for the first time allows us to share a single, modern rendering API between macOS, Linux and Windows for rendering – which is a huge step in the right direction.

What’s more: adding WebP support for images – interestingly, Firefox now requires this as a copy/paste format for images, and it’s long overdue to have this high quality format from Google supported.

Looking beyond this release, what else are you planning to do?

We work continuously on LibreOffice, all around the code from ongoing clean-ups, performance work, unit-tests (particularly important to avoid customer tickets regressing) and so on. We have a few things that are in the works currently.

Another thing that Tomaz, Sarper and Miklos will debut in LibreOffice 7.4 is the start of colour theme support for shapes, to allow us to re-style documents more deeply by changing the theme and palette. This should also help with interoperability and templating.

We’ve also added Sparkline support, providing a very pretty and useful way to quickly visualize data for LibreOffice 7.4.

You can read about the history of these from Edward Tufte.

Lubos has been working hard on jumbo sheets – allowing much larger number of columns in sheets (and more rows too) which should make interoperability much smoother for people with large spreadsheets.

And of course lots more – we’re expecting LibreOffice 7.4 to be packed with new and enhanced feature / function from the whole community – and Collabora.

Find out more

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